The Color of Law_ A Novel - Mark Gimenez [42]
But Bobby copped a plea: fear. “Shit, Scotty, East Dallas is scary enough for me,” he said. “Fat white dude like myself, I wouldn’t last five minutes in South Dallas. Sorry, man, but no way I’m risking my life for fifty bucks an hour!”
So it was that on the second day of July and the first hundred-degree day of the summer, A. Scott Fenney, Esq., $750,000-a-year corporate partner at Ford Stevens LLP, found himself driving a shiny red Ferrari 360 Modena slowly through a grim public housing project in South Dallas, past the rhythmic pounding of loud rap music and the glares of tough-looking young black men, and feeling as if he were driving a flashing neon sign that screamed CARJACK ME! Scott had played football with black teammates at SMU fourteen years ago, but he didn’t figure that would count for much with these guys. Without conscious thought, Scott slid down the leather seat until he could barely see over the steering wheel.
Thirty-six years Scott Fenney had lived in Dallas and not once had he driven into South Dallas. White people drove south of downtown three times each year and only for events held within the gated Fair Park grounds—the State Fair, the Oklahoma-Texas football game, and the Cotton Bowl game—being careful to stay on the interstate, to take the Fair Park exit, and to drive directly through the park gates without detour or delay. White people never drove into South Dallas, into the neighborhoods and mean streets of South Dallas, into the other Dallas of crime and crack cocaine, prostitution and poverty, drive-by shootings and gangbangers, into black Dallas, where a white boy from Highland Park driving a $200,000 Italian sports car was considered neither welcome nor very smart.
But here Scott was, parking in front of a concrete block building euphemistically called a “garden apartment” by the housing authority, although not a blade of grass much less a garden was evident to Scott’s eye. He cut the engine and was working up the courage to get out—the Ferrari had attracted a crowd—when the sun was suddenly blocked out by a Dallas Cowboys jersey on the biggest black man he’d ever seen on or off a football field. Black knuckles rapped against the blacked-out window. Scott lowered the window an inch.
The jersey moved down until Scott saw wide shoulders, a thick neck, and finally a broad black face. The man lowered his sunglasses and peered in.
“You the lawyer?”
“What?”
“You Shawanda’s lawyer?”
“Yeah.”
“You here for Pajamae?”
“Yeah, how—”
“Shawanda call me. She figured you might need a, uh…chaperone, if you know what I mean.”
Scott knew what he meant. He looked out both sides of the car at the crowd looking in, black women—girls really—with babies on their hips and toddlers clutching their thick legs and muscular black males, and he thought of Fight Night, the last time he had been in such close proximity to strong young black males. Started during the depths of the great Texas real-estate bust when the Dallas real-estate community desperately needed a distraction, Fight Night had become an annual tuxedo tradition: a boxing ring was set up in the swanky Anatole Hotel and black boxers were brought in to beat themselves senseless for the entertainment of rich white men smoking big cigars, eating thick steaks, drinking hard liquor, and playing patty-cake with beautiful young models hired for the night. Scott remembered thinking that the black boxers might be has-beens in the professional ranks, but they could KO every white guy in the joint with one punch—and probably wanted to.
Scott put on his glasses, not to appear smart, but in the hope that these black guys